Remembering LiveJournal, Or, My Search for Online Community

I started writing online in 1998. This is before “blogs,” before “Twitter,” before “micro-blogs,” before “tumblr.” This is before “SEO” and “e-books” and “blog monetization.” It was a Wild West of the Internet, and I wanted in.

I learned basic HTML and I picked up a copy of PageMill and I made my own websites with frames and backgrounds that were enormous, blown-up photographs from the lesbionic film High Art. And I found that there were people all over the world, young people, who were doing the same thing. I was living in a small town that I hated and all I wanted was to connect, connect, connect.

I started writing on LiveJournal in 2000. I wrote hard and fierce about everything that a young girl with a knack for wordsmithery and expressing emotion could put on the screen. I wrote about sex, school, politics, depression, my boyfriends. The morning after I was raped I went and posted about it before I told anyone (except for my friend, A., who took me to Planned Parenthood). I met other girls — and a few boys. Over a thousand followers signed on. Cliques formed. Loving, mutual-admiration-society cliques. Friendships came fast. Crises happened and we called with love and support. When I went into the hospital for the first time, I gave H. my password and she posted on my LiveJournal that I was in the ward.

We commented on one another’s posts, and then we started to meet in person all over the country. Romances formed, though not for me. I only had one negative experience with a girl that I met through LiveJournal, and it wasn’t Bad with a capital B, just Awkward. On that same trip, I met a genius girl (also on LiveJournal) who ended up coming to my wedding and designing all of my wedding paper goods.

H., the friend in the photo above, is one of those friends that I’ve known since I was, what, 13 (she had a web site before I did), and I spent last summer with her in Toronto, drinking wine on the shore and talking about the way things used to be.

Because LiveJournal, as a platform for communication, fell apart with the arrival of blogs and people getting older. Now it gets a bad rap. LiveJournal is reputed to be the home for angsty teens with too much time on their hands and not enough friends. By the time I was a junior in college, LiveJournal was hopelessly passe. Like the end of the Jazz Age, except without the flapper dresses.

And I thought, All right, now I’ve gotta find somewhere new to go, because I went through the hardest years of my life with online community, and writing is still my Thing.

I started this blog — what — a year ago, but I came in to see that the game had changed. Now people were making money off of their online writing. There was such a thing as ProBlogger. There were now blogger job listings. People wrote their posts like they were slight variants on magazine articles. I read things that said, “To drive traffic to your site, make lists. Make How-To articles, because people like How-To articles.”

I was a 27-year-old Internet dinosaur, and I missed the way things were. To be sure: I still miss the way things were. But I gotta move on. Can’t reminisce too much about Ye Olden Days.

I won a Red Shoe Blogger consulting session with the incredible Kelly Diels recently. I want to bring to her my fears about what the world of online writing is like, now. My need to find a new way to build an online community for myself. My everpresent yearning to connect when I fear that all the doors are closed.

Because I know the possibilities of the Internet. I just need to reclaim a space for myself in it.

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I know there are still some hangers-on, which impresses me. Right before I left, someone told me that I would never leave — but I knew that things had changed so much that I’d never be able to reclaim the feelings I once had towards it. I read your post on your site about similar issues and I say yes, yes, yes. That’s how I feel, too.

You know, it took me FOREVER to set up a feed reader. For the longest time, I just went to people’s websites. It was truly old-school of me. Now I use Bloglovin’, which has its problems, but serves me all right.

It makes me heart hurt a little when you say, “Should I stay or go to stop or something else?” Because I wondered the same thing. And even though I have this new place now to write things, I know it’s not the same, and that’s why I wrote this post, for the most part — because I’m still figuring it out. Thanks for commenting.

Wow, several copies of my zine! It’s funny — the zine community was so important to me, and then a lot of the zine community transferred to the LJ community. And now we’re all just dispersed.It warms my heart that your girls are coming to your wedding. (Congratulations!) A lot of my LJ friends put together a book for my wedding.
Yes — “not as an adult and not in a world where Google exists.” I walk that tightrope with this site, too. I’ll let you know how the Red Shoe experience goes.
xx

I like Tumblr though I really do like the privacy settings that LJ has which came in handy when I had some really creepy, nosey ex boyfriends, roommates, and classmates as an undergrad.My husband and I were talking about this today because he’d read your entry here and what struck him was that LJ seemed to be such a good place for so many women to come together and share their experiences with one another in what felt like a safer space.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as raw or openly vulnerable on any blog as I’d been in LJ. I wasn’t as open with strangers after a while and started making friends only posts but hell, I mean I was willing to get naked on LJ which was something very different for me to feel that exposed, to talk about and visually represent my physical insecurities, to talk about my depression or just to document those extreme lows. I mean, it definitely helped me be more conscious of what was going on with my own emotional/mental struggles. Of course… it’s kind of embarrassing to go back to some of those old entries!

I remember a site offering url names called usuck.com and I had a really awful name with them that when typed incorrectly would instead direct me to goatse. It just happened that someone registered that name and the url was one letter off from my own url.It was a scarring experience!

I read the post that you linked to — ugh. Not everyone was friendly or un-troll-like on LJ, that’s for sure.I agree re: the LJ discussion format. I’d like to replicate that on my blog, somehow. Hopefully the threaded comment format will help that.
xx

Hi Meggy, I followed you here from FFW (just re-discovered it tonight and it’s amazing but I really should be writing my overdue essay).
Anyway this post really resonates with me because I have never actively participated in online community with people I have never met before (there was probably the odd one here and there, but never in a deep friendship sort of way). I never had LJ, but I had Xanga (mostly for RL friends). And the countless times I’ve had my personal blog (Blogdrive, Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr) I never engaged in online community the way I see other have (and like you so wistfully describe here). And it’s strange because even on the Internet, I often stand on the edge as a voyeur at other people’s musings and lives in a way that mimics real life. I recently started a new photoblog at Tumblr and because I was on it before in a more personal/reblogging way, I knew better how to use it and interact with other Tumblr folks. And two months in I realise I think about the people I have met in Tumblr even when I am away from the computer. Which is crazy when I think about it (for me anyway) and so comforting, as I prepare myself for all my ‘soul’/close friends to leave me in the next year.

I also exist in all these other places online (personal; fashion) but have not found a way to meaningfully connect with other strangers (maybe it is the format of WordPress and Blogger?). How can we find new community in these instances then, if we’re already on these platforms? It’s a real question I’m pondering – like you – as I’m also figuring out the possibilities of how to find my space in it, with other strangers (are fiction!) in it.

Thanks for this post, and for sharing your thoughts/life on all other matters here, it’s so refreshing to read raw honest stuff, x

I love, love, love this post and I still use Livejournal! Though, not very often. But there are still some hangers-on!I’ve been writing online since about the same time you started, and I think about it a lot. I’ve written about it a few times on my blog; I’ve linked to an entry that’s kind of similar to this one. It’s always good to find another internet dinosaur! I miss the old days too.

I hang on tight to LJ. The fact that it is uncool again gives me hope that it might blossom again. Also, do people still GO to webpages? Haven’t they learned how to use RSS & set up a feed reader like Google Reader?

I still write in my LJ. It’s hard to give up, after a decade of my life has gone into there. (I have one of those permanent accounts I bought when they first sold them as fund raising things.) It’s getting quieter and harder and there isn’t really the same feeling anymore. I haven’t figured out what to do – should I stay or go or stop or something else? I have yet to figure it out.

Love this post, and relate to it so much. I had a different LJ clique than you but I think there was some overlap as I wound up with several copies of your zine. My girls–my circle was mostly girls–are still close to me, and coming to my wedding this fall.I’m definitely trying to figure out how to exist online right now. I feel lured by that confessional style I honed on LJ but it’s just not an option for me anymore, not as an adult and not in a world where Google exists. I hope you write about this more, particularly your Red Shoe experience.

I miss when people used LJ. I still do, but I keep a million other blogs as well. To some extent I feel like I still have my LJ account because a few people I know still use it regularly – but mostly I think it’s because I have a paid permanent account.

How do you feel about the differences between LJ and the other blogs that you keep? What different functions do they serve for you?I never had a permanent account, but I always had a paid account. I think part of the ultimate failure of LJ was that it was also SO UGLY, especially compared to newcomers like Tumblr. I don’t know why they never made it more attractive.

Great article. What’s a little ironic is that one of my friends on LJ linked me to this!I guess I want to say that though I imagine it’s different from your experience, my experience of LiveJournal is thriving and affirming. I joined in 2004 to keep up with high school friends and my college friends over the summers, but over the years while I still use it to some extent to keep up with those friends, I have expanded a great deal into making dozens (of course nothing to your thousands) of really close, tight-knit friends.
Yes, we all met through fandoms, but I have no experience of the angsty 13-yo drama you describe (mainly because I don’t follow childish fandoms that would attract these types) – we first connected to chat about shows, movies, and books, but it has fast developed into talking about our lives, supporting each other through our job searches (age range is early 20s-mid 30s in our group), celebrating successes and milestones, and helping each other improve creatively as well. In the past year, we too have started meeting in the physical world and forming more solid friendships complementary to our communications on LJ.
So I guess I just want to say that some of what you once experienced still does exist!

Oh, that’s really interesting! Yes, the kind of LJ experience you’re talking about is quite different from the one that I’m writing about — I know that fandom-type LJ communities were (are?) a big part of the LJ community experience, although I was never a part of that. I’m glad that it continues to be a positive part of your life, fandoms or not. Thank you for commenting!

Oh, I got so excited when I saw the title of this post. I miss LJ and the old internet, too. I’m 25 and have had LJ since 2002, and an Open Diary before that.I keep my LJ because it documents in raw, emotional detail the most painful years of my life: my early teens, my first boyfriend, my high school years, my mom’s death, college, leaving college early, moving 2000 miles away to pursue a dream, seeing that dream completely implode, and gingerly putting myself back together again before re-starting my life as a graduate student in New York. The privateness of LJ was both the appeal and the reason I left — I appreciated that it protected me from those I hadn’t pre-approved to read, but at the same time, I found myself reading more and more strangers’ non-LJ blogs, and wondering what life would be like outside of its Friends Only protection. When I was sick last spring (I had a 16cm ovarian cyst and I had to stay in the hospital for a week, and be away from work for a month), I found such comfort in googling to find others with similar experiences. I think keeping a public personal blog can be a tremendous public service to others, and it inspired me to try to be braver by venturing outside of LJ.
I started a WordPress as an experiment, and I’m reluctant to admit I’m a little frustrated by it. I can’t quite figure out why the community aspect doesn’t seem to be duplicated anywhere outside of LJ. I met most of my friends there by clicking through others’ comments to read their blogs — something I can easily do using any blog platform. I think the difference is how honest everyone’s writing was back then. It generated a lot of love among friends. I find it nearly impossible to write so openly, now.
One note — one of my LJ friends with a paid account syndicated my WordPress blog, so that she and my other friends could add me as a friend, and my posts would show up on their friends page. It’s not a perfect solution, but I think it helps me keep in touch.

i think i started making “homepages” (hahaha) around 1995 (GEOCITIES WHAT! …soho/studios/xxxx – i never sank so low as to use tripod). i later started using other services with shorter urls like altern.org and then moved on to mostly livejournal for a few years. anyway. yay nostalgia. i’d leave a link to my current online presence but its sole purpose is trolling.

The part where you said that you started WordPress as an experiment and are frustrated by it — and the lack of community that can’t seem to be duplicated — that rang so true to me. I feel the same way. I’m still trying to figure it out.I like the LJ syndication idea, but so few of my old LJ friends “live” there anymore. I don’t think it would work for me.
16 cm! The one I just had removed on Friday was 8 cm, and the one I had in 2006 was 10 cm. I’m sorry that you had to go through that.
xx

i had accounts on geocities (addresses in paris/rue and in vienna, i think) AND tripod AND xoom at various points. to my mind, tripod was definitely not less cool than geocities. however, that assessment might’ve had a lot to do with the fact that helena was on tripod.still in denial about the new internet.

You are not the only one who feels like a young Intranet Dinosaur. I started blogging on a mental health support site HealthyPlace and really felt connected. I am starting over and at the moment have approximately 4 people who read my blog – maybe it’s because I now feel like censor what I write sometime because I now know people in the real world. I won’t monetize my site, that is not what it is about for me. I say keep blogging and people will find you – and like you – and keep coming back – thus a community will be born!

I tried to type up a response to your last post that was, coincidentally, related to LJ, but I was having trouble expressing myself coherently and so I gave up. Since it is such a coincidence that you posted about both bi-polar disorder in college and LJ in the space of two days, though, I’ll leave you with the link to what I was trying to write about, from the LJ community of the college I graduated from (though it happened before I got there): http://community.livejournal.com/reedlj/432196.htmlSome context: my college has an absolutely dismal four-year graduation rate, so taking a leave is usually not a huge deal; the LJ community is (or was, back in the day) known for snark and flamewars as well as occasionally reasonable and intelligent discussions.
I was never one to connect with people I didn’t already know over the internet, but I do miss the LJ discussion format. Even though not too much has happened recently I still check my friends page every day.

yeah like the shitty “neighbourhoods” HAY GUISE I’M OVER ON BOURBON STREET PRETTY COOL. i remember xoom but i never used it. altern was rad. i think i also used fuckin…”envy.nu” or something when i lived in vancouver. nobody ever offered me a subdomain I CRIED ALONE.

In a certain way, I think LJ is the ideal blog platform. Straightforward but endlessly customizable, good comments platform, and the most amazing friends feed ever. I still use LJ as my diary-blog It’s way more powerful and well designed than Blogger. I wish it weren’t so passe…

I wish I could evangelize to everyone about feed readers– they really SHOULD be the way the internet works, & they WILL be the way it works, I think…it just depends on whether that happens in a year or a decade.If you are reading this comment & you don’t have a feed reader, go set one up right now! I recommend Google Reader (google.com/reader) & Meggy apparently recommends Bloglovin’, though I wish she used Google Reader so she could share pages with me.

just looking through this comments section is a trip. i miss lj, too. i feel a lot of pressure to ‘brand’ myself with a blog and a domain name and all of that… and i hate not really knowing who my audience is. livejournal was the perfect niche for a while, at just the right time. i wish i felt better equipped to reconcile what was available then with what’s presented to us now, as far as Writing on the Internet goes.

Thank you for this post! I just started a blog recently and I sometimes get frustrated when reading those “advice to new bloggers” articles about creating how-to posts and whatnot. Not that those types of posts can’t be useful if I am trying to learn how to do something, but I feel that that is not particularly what I’m interested in writing. I want to be more personal and to write through my own uncertainties and questions in order to figure things out, and to chronicle. I also had a livejournal as a teenager, and I do still write in it sometimes because there are a few people on there whom I would like to keep in touch with.I remember how online journals were before blogging really took off — the first thing I think to describe them is just “more personal.” There are a lot of great personal blogs out there, but there is also a lot of advice focused on making money and gaining traffic by writing a USEFUL blog. I also find there is a lot of pressure to be a “positive” blog — never write about the negative. While I definitely agree that a blogger shouldn’t use her blog to complain or write negative things about other people, I think the pressure to constantly be positive leads to many bloggers unwillingly presenting a false image of their lives being “perfect,” which makes others jealous — when in fact the bloggers have their own struggles just like anyone else.
I’m not sure how to work through these issues but I appreciate your post so much for making me think about them. I guess sometimes what I want in blogging is not particularly what is useful, but what is genuine. Not in the confessional/share-all style that I felt was often what LJ was about, but in a different way.

Yes — I’m definitely not saying that I’m not embarrassed by most of my old entries! But I find them so earnest by comparison to what is out there in the “blog world” now. My friend R. said, re: this post, that I’m a lot less “raw” on TNH than I was on my LJ, and it’s true. But my bosses read this blog — my mom reads this blog — my cousins read this blog. And I just can’t do things like get naked, figuratively OR literally.xx

I still kinda cling to LJ, i just can’t help myself, even though i now rarely post, same as everyone else. I still follow a bunch of the same people, on facebook or tumblr or twitter or through their blogs or all of the above, but it’s not the same and it makes me sad. But, i’ve been doing the whole online journal thing since i was 15 or 16, which is now half my life, and livejournal since 2001 i think, and that’s a big chunk of time [and lots of shared growth!] to let go of easy. And i am also having a hard time finding my new niche.I pretty much should have just said “ditto” and left it at that. =)

I still use LiveJournal and though many of my old friends have moved on, I’ve made new ones, people from the feminist, parenting, mental health and disability circles I now run in. There is a new one called Dreamwidth that I have pseudo-moved to (it cross-posts every post I make there to my LiveJournal). I won’t be giving LJ up because I’ve been spilling my guts about my life there for nearly seven years. My son’s whole life is documented there. I like it because it’s private and I can control who reads what. Plus I have a permanent account and it would seem like a waste of money to stop using it. ;o)

i too miss the feeling of communit, and am so glad to still be in touch with girls like you and helena. but mainly im glad the height of LJ happened around in my late teens/early 20s when i needed it most!

I am struggling through similar issues–a sort of Internet OCD combined with irritability and fear about how it is now. Nowadays, it seems EVERYONE has a blog, but it’s not personal or heartfelt (much like LJ was), but it seems people are out to earn a living or they blog about a speciality, e.g. fashion, cooking, etc. Maybe I’m just missing the point, but I find it hard to relate. I’ve created and deleted numerous blogs, Tumblrs and Twitter accounts because I get bored. It feels forced and uninteresting. Not to mention there are too many things to keep up with: Tumblr, blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook. I liked just having e-mail and a blog/journal. The personal-diary style of “blogs” (or their pre-cursors) were so much more interesting. I miss the seemingly sincere connections I made through LJ and similar platforms.

livejournal is and always will be, I predict, the only place where you can completely spill your guts out. The only place where you can be negative-about yourself, your life, your family and friends and know that it’s friends-locked; they will never find it, and your employer will never find it.
Livejournal gave us a legitimate place to vent which is not granted to us in any other aspect of the internet..

From a feminist standpoint, I think it’s really important to give women a legitimate safe space to vent their anger and frustration- there simply isn’t that space in our normal lives. It isn’t seen as socially acceptable to be depressed or angry, especially if you’re a women.

Oh wow, hi! I found you via Teri V. and at first I was like, “Hm, that woman looks familiar…” and I managed to figure it out in this post about LJ. 🙂 I still post there on occasion but it’s just not the same…. however I will be grateful for having a sort of “no holds barred” place to write and read about in my archives, all that. So I continue, even though the sense of community I once had there is severely diminished. I hope all is well – you look beautiful!

oh, yes! I was on LJ back in 2000, spilling my angsty teenage guts (and I remember making Gurlpages and Chickpages websites before that). I had my LJ account for 7 years, but as I grew up moved from writing to only reading others’ posts, and finally deleted the account as it seemed no longer relevant. Just recently decided to start a new blog, and it does feel like a strange, lonely place, with much more worry of how much to share.

It’s so hard to find anyone still interested in LiveJournal-style writing, and by “so hard” I mean I haven’t found anyone (I found this post by googling “do people still use livejournal”). It’s one of the biggest losses in my life, silly to say it – I grew so much from using it, and really LEARNED about other people by reading what they wrote. Now it’s just statuses and tweets. I miss the old days.

Hi Esme! I found your blog through a friend and it is very lovely; it does remind me of all those livejournals from the early 2000’s that are sadly gone now. If this were a decade ago, I would add you to my friends list but now everyone uses so many different blogging platforms. I am on tumblr but I haven’t really found anyone on there that writes like people used to write on livejournal, it is a little disheartening. Anyway, hope you are doing well!

About Esmé

Esmé Weijun Wang is an award-winning writer and advocate. At The Unexpected Shape, she provides resources that assist ambitious people who live with limitations, allowing them to develop both resilience and mastery on the path to building a legacy. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, is now available for purchase.

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